


Comfort

by Kes



Category: Books of the Raksura - Martha Wells
Genre: Family feelings, Gen, Missing Scene, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:15:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29857935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: After the events of Edge of Worlds and Harbours of the Sun, Moon is hurting, on edge, and frightened. But he has people who love him.Missing scene with Moon, Malachite, and Shade.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	Comfort

Moon’s legs took him roaming through the colony, but he couldn’t sit down. Even in the nurseries, where his arrival was greeted by shrieks of joy, he couldn’t make himself stop. The children wanted to play. He fled from their enthusiasm rather faster than he would have fled a pack of tree-canopy predators.

Jade would be worried. Well, the teachers would probably be worried about him now he’d done that. The weight of worry bore down on him like the colony tree’s waterfall, and he had no idea what to do with it.

The warriors from Opal Night took one look at him and ushered him in to the bower Malachite was staying in. He hadn’t noticed himself coming here, wasn’t even sure he wanted to be here, but it seemed harder to extricate himself than to come face to face with his birthqueen, again. His birthqueen who would, if he gave even the slightest hint he wanted her to, take him away from Indigo Cloud, from Jade. From his clutch?

Her spines twitched in greeting, as though she too wasn’t sure what to say; even in her Arbora form she was dark and huge on the other side of the heating stones. “Moon,” said another voice, and he realised she wasn’t alone. Shade was snuggled up against her side, just like he had been on the boat, the contented relaxation on his face fading into worry. Moon’s hands clenched as he made himself sit down. He shouldn’t have come. Probably they thought he was coming to ask them to take him away. Probably they were wrong.

“She told me,” he said, realising he was too far from the heat of the stones and using the excuse of shuffling closer to avoid looking at his family. He was so cold.

“So you understand, now.” Malachite’s control, her carefully neutral voice, grated against him. “Do you still wish to stay?”

He looked down at his hands. They’d mostly healed, but the bones were just slightly crooked, the skin pale and mottled in places. When Chime had seen them he’d asked, anxious, whether it would affect Moon’s ability to do anything – but it wasn’t as though Moon was an artist or any sort of craftsman. He could still touch Jade with them, still pick up his babies. The claws were still sharp.

On the other side of the stones Malachite and Shade waited for his answer. He forced himself to consider it. That was why he’d come here, probably. To force himself to think about it. He had a clutch here, a life, a queen he loved. But a queen he’d lied to. It had been a quick sort of lie, the sort you excuse to yourself and to everyone else around you. _I would have done the same_. He’d known it was a lie when he said it, even though there was a meaning behind it that was completely truth. The words were wrong. The words were always wrong.

 _They stole something_ , he’d said to the groundlings in the swamp city, and they’d only listened when Stone said _they stole people_. It had been his instinct to hide the vulnerability. Stone’s to let it speak for them. Let it fight for them.

All that time being lonely, and he’d never anticipated that being loved would hurt this much.

He tried to imagine saying yes to Malachite. The sheer insult that would offer to Jade, to Pearl and Indigo Cloud by extension. The rifts that would follow, down the delicate structure of Raksura politics. Just a few turns ago he wouldn’t have understood that. And Malachite would do it, he knew, would rip apart any alliance she needed to. For him.

It was terrifying.

And what of his clutch, in all this? They were a part of Indigo Cloud, his and Jade’s in equal measure; one day they would be fully-fledged queens and consorts themselves, and he would have other children, warriors and Arbora, and they would go out in the world where he couldn’t protect them. Like Malachite couldn’t protect him. Except like – that.

Moon burst into tears.

“Come here,” Shade said, gently, and dimly Moon could see that he’d sat up, making space between him and Malachite.

He couldn’t go to them. “I don’t want to. I don’t want you to take me,” he choked out. “I have to stay. I want to stay.”

There was stillness and silence for a moment, broken only by the sound of him, sobbing. He hated it. The heating stones didn’t seem to be working, which was ridiculous, Raksura didn’t get cold like this.

Then Malachite spoke. “It is your choice. But Moon, I hate to see you hurt.”

He knew. Everyone hated to see him hurt. Did they think he liked it, himself?

“She means that just because you don’t want to come with us doesn’t mean you have to stay away now,” Shade added, a trace of impatience in his voice. He hadn’t leaned back against her.

For a moment he hesitated, and then bolted across the room into their arms. Malachite pulled him into her lap like he was still a fledgeling, and Shade wrapped himself around the both of them, their bodies warm and solid. It wasn’t like huddling up with Sorrow. Malachite was so much larger, the scars on her body standing up amidst the scales of her Arbora form, and she did not relax; but she was safety. Sorrow had felt like safety, too, up until she wasn’t anymore. She’d tried to protect them, taking them as far away as she could from a colony overrun and apparently maddened.

Moon cried harder, and Shade snuggled up closer, took Moon’s battered hands into his own.

-

At some point he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up in the guest bower with Shade still wrapped around him and Malachite nowhere in sight. He felt exhausted, wrung out and empty and a bit sick, and for a confused moment wondered if he’d been poisoned again – but no. Feelings didn’t need poison to do this to him.

“Are you feeling better?” Shade asked.

Moon shook his head, and his brother gave him a gentle squeeze, one hand cupping the back of his head the way Malachite had last night, the way Moon had on Delin’s ship when they were still in the Fell sac. “I hate this,” he managed to say after a few moments. “I hate feeling –” and he cut himself off before he said the word delicate. Even if Shade wasn’t any longer the sheltered consort Moon had met in his bower in Opal Night, it still felt wrong to say that to him.

“I know you hate feeling,” Shade murmured. Moon’s involuntary snort in response startled him more than it startled Shade, he thought.

His thoughts kept running back to that nightmare journey. All the nightmare journeys. He’d once seen a groundling artefact with a central ball of glowing stuff and a glass dome around it. The glowing stuff leaped outwards like lightning to the glass, at random. It felt like he was that glowing core and the glass all the memories his thoughts spurted towards, erratically, out of control. “When the Fell had you,” he began, and felt Shade stiffen slightly next to him. “When you left the disks. I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have thought of doing that. Then in Kish, I put things that smelled like me for Stone to find.”

“Good,” Shade said, slowly. “I’m glad you learned. I was terrified, with the Fell. Of them, of what they might make me do, of what I might become. But I knew Malachite was coming. I knew you were coming, if you were still alive.”

“You’d only known me a few days.”

“I’m a good judge of character.” Like a consort was meant to be. “You’re like her. You’d claw apart a mountain-tree with your bare hands if someone of yours needed you to.”

That made Moon cry again – not the terrible sobbing of last night, but a quieter sadness. He’d lied to Jade. He couldn’t lie to Shade. “It scares me. That I’d do that. That people would do that for me.”

Shade tucked his head in against Moon’s shoulder and whispered, “You’re loved, Moon.”

He barely heard it. “It scares me that someone might choose me over the Reaches, over everyone else. It scares me that I might choose them.” Shade stiffened and Moon bit his lip, realised he’d said too much. “Sorry – sorry.”

“No – don’t apologise.” But as Moon pulled back and furiously blinked his own tears away, he could see Shade’s lip wobbling.

“I’ve scared you, too.”

“It’s all right. It’s scary. It’s all scary. And it’s not fair.” It made Shade sound so much younger than he was. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s true. It’s not fair. Why don’t the horrible things happen to other people, sometimes? Jade shouldn’t have had to make that choice in the first place –”

“Because I shouldn’t have been there –” Should have been a real consort, at home with his clutch –

“No, because nobody should have been there! Because the Hians shouldn’t have done it! The Fell – well, most of the Fell, the ones with progenitors, anyway – can’t help it, they just hurt people, but the Hians had a choice and the forerunners and foundation builders shouldn’t have built anything like that in the first place. It doesn’t make sense.” Shade curled in against Moon again, and automatically Moon hugged him close for comfort they both needed. “It’s stupid and it’s hurt you and everyone else and I hate it.”

“Me too.” Moon sighed, and sat up, pulling Shade with him. He was ravenous, he realised.


End file.
